LinuxQuestions.org - System uncleanly shut down, ran e2fsck, very slow start & slow desktop

I'm running Fedora Core 1 on my laptop, dual booted with Windows XP. Using filesystem ext3. I'm at work and don't have the installation CDs and (foolishly) don't have a copy of my recovery boot disk.

This morning when I started Fedora, a message appeared during startup that the machine has shut down uncleanly. I could swear that I shut it down normally last night, but must not have. I chose to force a system filecheck. The filecheck showed "1.9% non-contiguous" and things seemed to be fixed.

I rebooted, but the startup the system takes a long time to start the system logger, NFS statd, cups, sendmail, and sm-client. It takes about 3 to 5 minutes to start each of those processes, and it now takes about 25 minutes total to boot to the screen for user login. I could (and really should) shut down sendmail and sm-client, as I do not need them, but I believe I need at least NFS & cups (sometimes) to run. Once I logged in and started KDE, it was so slow that it was unusable.

I spent the morning searching the Web & Usenet and found recommendations (including "Fedora Core 1-Newbie Help Please" and "Unclean shutdown from power failure... filesystem check errors" from this forum) for running e2fsck on the drive/partition. I had no luck trying to do that initially, since it's not a good idea to run e2fsck on a mounted drive and I couldn't unmount it properly or mount it in read-only mode. I booted up Knoppix and ran e2fsck on my unmounted partition and got the following:

e2fsck 1.33 (21-Apr-2003)
Pass 1: Checking inodes, blocks, and sizes
Pass 2: Checking directory structure
Pass 3: Checking directory connectivity
Pass 4: Checking reference counts
Pass 5: Checking group summary information

207812 inodes used (27%)
3905 non-contiguous inodes (1.9%)
# of inodes with ind/dind/tind blocks:
10713/67/0
1152985 blocks used (75%)
0 bad blocks
0 large files

168529 regular files
12075 directories
2658 character device files
15884 block device files
1 fifos
3588 links
8620 symbolic links (8615 fast symbolic links)
36 sockets
--------
211391 files

I rebooted into Fedora and it is still slow in starting the processes I listed above.

I'm faily new to all of this, but it would appear to me that it's not a filesystem problem, or at least not a problem that I know of/understand. I attempted to search for mor information, but am not sure where to go from here or what I should even be searching for. I would appreciate any help or even a nudge in the right direction. Thank you.

Jason